Regrets, I Have a Few
About the Far Porch: Years ago, I spent time living and working in Kenya, gathering stories about community, hope, and the small things that keep us connected — even from a world away. These reflections first appeared in my blog and my book Poverty & Promise. I’m sharing them here again on Porchlight Press to remind us that the far porch isn’t so far when we listen for each other’s voices.
Why I’m Sharing This Now: Some stories stay with you because they never really resolve. These memories from the slums of Nyalenda remind me how quickly hope can slip through your fingers — and how the ones left behind keep fighting anyway. We don’t always get to show up on time. But we can learn to do better next time.
Regrets, I Have a Few…
Last Thursday, we walked through the slums of Nyalenda — meeting people, listening to their daily struggles, learning where help is needed most. Walter and Tonny asked if I minded visiting Eric, a friend of theirs. Of course, I didn’t mind.
We crossed the creek and passed one mud house with a thatched roof, then another, until we reached Eric’s house in the back. The roof was made from the stems of papyrus — cheap, fragile, temporary. We heard singing and hand clapping inside, a mournful kind of music.
Nyalenda, a neighborhood in
KISUMU, KENYA
“Eric has AIDS,” Walter told me. Eric was twenty-six and had been showing signs for months, bed-ridden for weeks. His family wouldn’t accept it. They believed demons were visiting him. Their spiritual leader was inside now, exorcising the demons with songs and prayers and hand claps.
Walter and Tonny had tried, more than once, to convince Eric to go to the VCT — Voluntary Counseling and Testing — center. But the stigma was too heavy. In the slums, an AIDS diagnosis doesn’t just bring shame — it can bring abandonment, gossip, fear. Eric could see no good in telling everyone he was infected. But Walter and Tonny knew. They also knew the government now claimed to provide ARVs free of charge, drugs that could restore health, weight, dignity. If Eric would only agree.
We stood outside his mud house, in that compound in the heart of Nyalenda, and Walter decided we’d come back next week. We’d try again. We settled on Wednesday, then finished our tour of the slum’s water ways.
Today, Walter popped his head into my office — a surprise in the middle of a busy day. He was looking for Tonny but couldn’t find him. He shook my hand, gave me a hug, and sat down. He seemed restless. We talked about our holiday weekends.
Then he said, “Remember Eric?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re still going to visit him tomorrow, aren’t we?”
Walter rocked in his chair, made a tisking noise with his tongue. “I’ve just been to the hospital,” he said. “Eric is dead.”
Walter rocked back and forth. “Dead. Dead.”
I didn’t know what to say except, “I’m so, so sorry, Walter.” His mind seemed to pitch ideas on top of pain. Eric had been part of his organization — one of the ones trying to make Nyalenda better. Now his widowed mother was left with one son. They’d take Eric back to his family’s homeplace, twenty kilometers away, to bury him.
Walter kept rocking. “Dead.”
I suggested he name the shelter he planned to build in Eric’s honor. He nodded. “This is a lesson to me,” he said. “I won’t wait with my other friends. I will insist they go for testing and medicine.”
“Do you have many other friends with AIDS?” I asked.
“Several,” he said. “Too many.”
I was called into a meeting, so Walter and I walked to the front together. I promised to tell Tonny the news. Walter stopped at the door. “What about the camera?” he asked, almost in a panic. “Will you bring it tomorrow?” We’d planned to photograph the neighborhood — its water source, the latrines, the children, the widows. I told him yes. I’d bring the camera.
Walter leaned in, tall and slim, so earnest. “We missed an opportunity,” he said. And I knew exactly what he meant. Eric. Just one more day and we’d have had his picture.
Walter needn’t worry. I’ll bring the camera tomorrow. We’ll photograph the neighborhood. His friends with AIDS. All of them.
Too many of them.
Back to Nyalenda
A few days later, we went back — because life doesn’t stop for grief, and the work didn’t either.
Walter and I moved deeper into the interior of the slum. Garbage dumps sat on paths between houses — open piles of human waste and household scraps, chickens, and goats digging through the mounds. The stench was sharp. Garbage pits could be dug below ground and covered with earth, but here they just sat there — rotting, breeding flies, right outside a family’s door.
With the camera, we documented everything: the dumps, the broken latrines left standing too close to the water, minnows from Lake Victoria spread out to dry in the midday sun while flies turned the fish from white to black. Two boys drew water from the stream. Women sold fruit. Widows tended children. Children posed for the camera like tiny professionals.
Not everyone wanted a picture. The first group of women we spoke to asked for something in return. I watched Walter stand in the hot sun, explaining — his voice calm but insistent — what his organization was trying to do. Long-term benefits, not just a few shillings for a photo. The talk turned sharp. Though I couldn’t follow every word, I felt the tension like a pull on my skin. Walter gave a slight nod — Let’s move on. So we did.
Then an older woman approached, speaking English. She shook my hand, welcomed me, told me to stop by anytime. She was Mama Ogai, the village elder’s wife. She posed with another woman selling corn. One of the women from the first group tried to sneak into the frame, but the corn seller blocked her out with her whole body and three sharp “No”s.
The corn was heaped in a wheelbarrow. The seller dug her container deep, lifted it dramatically. Mama Ogai held out a basket — straw covered in dried cow dung — while the kernels fell in like tiny treasures. They were triumphant after the shot, holding their heads high.
I understood why people expected payment. So many groups come through Nyalenda — promises, pictures, donors. But they rarely saw the visitors again. Some people took photos to raise money and then disappeared with it. It’s hard to blame anyone for wanting a few shillings now, rather than a better tomorrow that might never come. Corruption trickles down — from the top-top, as they say.
We visited the old Mama again — where a new well would be built. She sat in the same chair outside her door, too sick to move much. TB, maybe. It seemed every other person we met was sick with something — not just AIDS but cancer, diarrhea, typhoid. Deadly, all of it, when the money runs out or the medicine never comes.
Several toddlers, naked, sat in bright plastic basins while older children soaped and rinsed them under the sun. Last time, they screamed at my white skin, ran for cover. This time, only one screamed. The others just stared. Maybe, I thought, one more visit and they won’t run at all.
But one little girl sitting under a fruit stand started to cry. The ladies laughed. I stepped back, saying “pole” — sorry — but the mother yelled at her child and threw a flip-flop at her legs. The child screamed louder. I backed away faster, sorry for upsetting the child.
Before we left, we stopped at Eric’s house. Mama Eric wasn’t home. Walter leaned in through the door — just enough to see the empty room. Eric had only been gone two days. A picture of Jesus hung on the wall above two carved chairs with red velvet cushions. We’d stood right there a week earlier, hearing the singing prayers and clapping hands, trying to exorcise the demon. Today, there was nothing but silence.
Sometimes the regrets stay with you. But so does the lesson: come closer, sooner. Listen better. Hold the camera steady. And never look away.
If only regret could raise the dead or right the crooked paths we walk — but it can’t. All it can do is stand beside us, whispering what we should have done, as we gather now to bury a man we all failed in one way or another. Eric’s funeral is next.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
